Switch off the stars
by Isa'ralia Faradien
Summary: Discover the beauty of the "Revenge of the Sith" novelisation by Matthew Stover through this collection of its fine poetry.
1. Intro

.

.

**Switch off the stars**

_Discover the beauty of the "Revenge of the Sith" novelisation by Matthew Stover through this collection of its fine poetry._


	2. Introduction

**#1**

**Introduction**

* * *

This story happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It is already over. Nothing can be done to change it.

It is a story of love and sacrifice, brotherhood and betrayal, courage and sacrifice and the death of dreams. It is a story of the blurred line between our best and our worst.

It is the story of the end of an age.

A strange thing about stories–

Though this all happened so long ago and so far away that words cannot describe the time or the distance, it is also happening right now. Right here.

It is happening as you read these words.

This is how twenty-five millennia come to a close. Corruption and treachery have crushed a thousand years of peace. This is not just the end of a republic; night is falling on civilization itself.

This is the twilight of the Jedi.

The end starts now.


	3. Prologue (1)

**#2**

**Prologue (#1)**

* * *

The skies of Coruscant blaze with war.

The artificial daylight spread by the capital's orbital mirrors is sliced by intersecting flames of ion drives and punctuated by starbust explosions; contrails of debris raining into the atmosphere become tangled ribbons of cloud. The nightside sky is an infinite lattice of shining hairlines that interlock planetoids and track erractic spirals of glowing gnats. Beings watching from rooftops of Coruscant's endless cityscape can find it beautiful.

From the inside, it's different.

The gnats are drive-glows of starfighters. The shining hairlines are light-scatter from turbolaser bolts powerful enough to vaporize a small town. The planetoids are capital ships.

The battle from the inside is a storm of confusion and panic, of galvened particle beams flashing past your starfighter so close that your cockpit rings like a broken annunciator, of the boot-sole shock of concussion missiles that blast into your cruiser, killing beings you have trained with and eaten with and played and laughed and bickered with. From the inside, the battle is desperation and terror and stomach-churning certainty that the whole galaxy is trying to kill you.


	4. Prologue (2)

**#3**

**Prologue (#2)**

* * *

Grievous is a _monster_.

The Separatist Supreme Commander is an abomination of nature, a fusion of flesh and droid – and his droid parts have more compassion than what remains of his alien flesh. This half-living creature is a slaughterer of billions. Whole planets have burned at his command. He is the evil genius of the Confederacy. The architect of their victories.

The author of their atrocities.


	5. Part One: Victory

**#4**

**Part One: Victory**

* * *

The dark is generous.

Its first gift is concealment: our true faces lie in the dark beneath our skins, our true hearts remain shadowed deeper still. But the greatest concealment lies not in protecting our secret truths, but in hiding from us the truth of others.

The dark protects us from what we dare not know.

Its second gift is comforting illusion: the ease of gentle dreams in night's embrace, the beauty that imagination brings to what would repel in day's harsh light. But the greatest of its comforts is the illusion that the dark is temporary: that every night brings a new day. Because it is day that is temporary.

Day is the illusion.

Its third gift is the light itself: as days are defined by the nights that divide them, as stars are defined by the infinite black through which they wheel, the dark embraces the light, and brings it forth from the center of its own self.

With each victory of the light, it is the dark that wins.


	6. Chapter 1 (1)

**#5**

**Chapter 1: _Anakin & Obi-Wan_ (#1)**

* * *

Obi-Wan kept hoping to hear some of Anakin's old cocky grin in his tone, but he never did. Not since Jabiim. Perhaps not since Geonosis.

The war had burned it out of him.

Obi-Wan still tried, now and again, to spark a real smile in his former Padawan. And Anakin still tried to answer.

They both still tried to pretend the war hadn't changed them.


	7. Chapter 1 (2)

**#6**

**Chapter 1: _Anakin & Obi-Wan_ (#2)**

* * *

This is Obi-Wan Kenobi:

A phenomenal pilot who doesn't like to fly. A devastating warrior who'd rather not fight. A negotiator without peer who frankly prefers to sit alone in a quiet cave and meditate.

Jedi Master. General in the Grand Army of the Republic. Member of the Jedi Council. And yet, inside, he feels like he's none of these things.

Inside, he still feels like a Padawan.

It is a truism of the Jedi Order that a Jedi Knight's education truly begins only when he becomes a Master: that everything important about being a Master is learned from one's student. Obi-Wan feels the truth of this every day.

He sometimes dreams of when he was a Padawan in fact as well as feeling; he dreams that his own Master, Qui-Gon Jinn, did not die at the plasma-fueled generator core in Theed. He dreams that his Master's wise guiding hand is still with him. But Qui-Gon's death is an old pain, one with which he long ago came to terms.

A Jedi does not cling to the past.

And Obi-Wan knows, too, that to have lived his life without being Master to Anakin Skywalker would have left him a different man. A lesser man.

Anakin has taught him so much.

Obi-Wan sees so much of Qui-Gon in Anakin that sometimes it hurts his heart; at the very least, Anakin mirrors Qui-Gon's flair for the dramatic, and his casual disregard for rules. Training Anakin – and fighting beside him, all these years – had unlocked something inside Obi-Wan. It's as though Anakin had rubbed off on him a bit, and has loosened that clenched-jaw insistence on absolute correctness that Qui-Gon always said was his greatest flaw.

Obi-Wan Kenobi had learned to relax.

He smiles now, and sometimes even jokes, and has become known for the wisdom gentle humor can provide. Though he does not know it, his relationship with Anakin had molded him into the great Jedi Qui-Gon always said he might someday be.

It is characteristic of Obi-Wan that he is entirely unaware of this.

Being named to the Council came as a complete surprise; even now, he is sometimes astonished by the faith the Jedi Council has in his abilities, and the credit they give to his wisdom. Greatness was never his ambition. He wants only to perform whatever task he is given to the best of his ability.

He is respected throughout the Jedi Order for his insight as well as his warrior skill. He has become the hero of the next generation of Padawans; he is the Jedi their Masters hold up as a model. He is the being that the Council assigns to their most important missions. He is modest, centered, and always kind.

He is the ultimate Jedi.

And he is proud to be Anakin Skywalker's best friend.


	8. Chapter 1 (3)

**#7**

**Chapter 1: _Anakin & Obi-Wan_ (#3)**

* * *

If only _he'd_ been there, instead of Shaak Ti and Stass Allie, Council members or not. If he had been here, Chancellor Palpatine would be home and safe already. Instead, Anakin had been stuck running aroud the Outer Rim for months like some useless Padawan, and all Palpatine had for protectors were Jedi who were _clever_ and _subtle_.

Clever and subtle. He could whip any ten _clever and subtle_ Jedi with his lightsaber tied behind his back.

But he knew better than to say so.


	9. Chapter 1 (4)

**#8**

**Chapter 1: _Anakin & Obi-Wan_ (#4)**

* * *

He gave himself to the battle, and his starfighter whirled and his cannons hammered, and droids on all sides began to burst into clouds of debris and superheated gas.

This was how _he_ relaxed.

This is Anakin Skywalker:

The most powerful Jedi of his generation. Perhaps of any generation. The fastest. The strongest. An unbeatable pilot. An unstoppable warrior. On the ground, in the air or sea or space, there is no one even close. He has not just power, not just skill, but _dash_: that rare, invaluable combination of boldness and grace.

He is the best there is at what he does. The best there has ever been. And he knows it.

HoloNet features call him the Hero with No Fear. And why not? What should he be afraid of?

Except–

Fear lives inside him anyway, chewing away the fire-walls around his heart.

Anakin sometimes think of the dread that eats at his heart as a dragon. Children on Tatooine tell each other of the dragons that live inside the suns; smaller cousins of the sun-dragons are supposed to live inside the fusion furnaces that power everything from starships to Podracers.

But Anakin's fear is another kind of dragon. A cold kind. A dead kind.

Not nearly dead enough.

Not long after he became Obi-Wan's Padawan, all those years ago, a minor mission had brought them to a dead system: one so immeasurably old that its star had long ago turned to a frigid dwarf of hypercompacted trace metals, hovering a quantum fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Anakin couldn't even remember what the mission might have been, but he'd never forgotten that dead star.

It had scared him.

"_Stars_ can _die_–?"

"It is the way of the universe, which is another manner of saying that it is the will of the Force," Obi-Wan had told him. "Everything dies. In time, even stars burn out. This is why Jedi form no attachments: all things pass. To hold on to something – or someone – beyond its time is to set your selfish desires against the Force. That is a path of misery, Anakin; the Jedi do not walk it."

That is the kind of fear that lives inside Anakin Skywalker: the dragon of a dead star. It is an ancient, cold dead voice within his heart that whispers _all things die_...

In bright day he can't hear it; battle, a mission, even a report before the Jedi Council, can make him forget it's even there. But at night–

At night, the wall he has built sometimes start to frost over. Sometimes they start to crack.

At night, the dead-star dragon sometimes sneaks through the cracks and crawls up into his brain and chews at the inside of his skull. The dragon whispers of what Anakin has lost. And what he will lose.

The dragon reminds him, every night, of how he held his dying mother in his arms, of how she had spent her last strength to say _I knew you would have come for me, Anakin..._

The dragon reminds him, every night, that someday he will lose Obi-Wan. He will lose Padmé. Or they will lose him.

_All things die, Anakin Skywalker. Even stars burn out..._

And the only answers he ever has for these dead cold whispers are his memories of Obi-Wan's voice, or Yoda's.

But sometimes he can't quite remember them.

_all things die..._

He can barely even think about it.

But right now he doesn't have a choice: the man he flies to rescue is a closer friend than he'd ever hoped to have. That's what puts the edge in his voice when he tries to make a joke; that's what flattens his mouth and tightens the burn-scar high on his right cheek.

The Supreme Chancellor has been family to Anakin: always there, always caring, always free with advice and unstinting aid. A sympathetic ear and a kindly, loving, unconditional acceptance of Anakin exactly as he is – the sort of acceptance Anakin could never get from another Jedi. Not even from Obi-Wan. He can tell Palpatine things he could never share with his Master.

He can tell Palpatine things he can't even tell Padmé.

Now the Supreme Chancellor is in the worst kind of danger. And Anakin is on his way despite the dread boiling through his blood. That's what makes him a real hero. Not the way the HoloNet labels him; not without fear, but _stronger_ than fear.

He looks the dragon in the eye and doesn't even slow down.

If anyone can save Palpatine, Anakin will. Because he's already the best, and he's still getting better. But locked away behind the walls of his heart, the dragon that is his fear coils and squirms and hisses.

Because his real fear, in an universe where even stars can die, is that being the best will never be quite good enough.


	10. Chapter 1 (5)

**#9**

**Chapter 1: _Anakin & Obi-Wan_ (#5)**

* * *

The cross of burn-scar beside Anakin's eye went pale as he turned his starfighter in pursuit. Obi-Wan was right. He almost always was.

_You can't save everyone._

His mother's body, broken and bloody in his arms–

Her battered eyes struggling to open–

The touch of her smashed lips–

_I knew you would come to me... I missed you so much..._

That's what it was to be not quite good enough.

It could happen anytime. Anyplace. If he was a few minutes late. If he let his attention drift for a single second. If he was a whisker too weak.

Anyplace. Anytime.

But not there, not now.

He forced his mother's face back down below the surface of his consciousness.

Time to get to work.


	11. Chapter 1 (6)

**#10**

**Chapter 1: _Anakin & Obi-Wan_ (#6)**

* * *

This, then, is Obi-Wan and Anakin:

They are closer than friends. Closer than brothers. Though Obi-Wan is sixteen standard years Anakin's elder, they have become men together. Neither can imagine life without the other. The war has forged their two lives into one.

The war that has done this is not the Clone Wars; Obi-Wan and Anakin's war began on Naboo, when Qui-Gon Jinn died at the hand of a Sith Lord. Master and Padawan and Jedi Knights together, they have fought this war for thirteen years. Their war is their life.

And their life is a weapon.

Say what you will about the wisdom of ancient Master Yoda, or the deadly skill of grim Mace Windu, the courage of Ki-Adi-Mundi, or the subtle wiles of Shaak Ti; the greatness of all these Jedi is unquestioned, but it pales next to the legend that had grown around Kenobi and Skywalker.

They stand alone.

Together, they are unstoppable. Unbeatable. They are the ultimate go-to-guys of the Jedi Order. When the Good Guys absolutely, positively have to _win_, the call goes out.

Obi-Wan and Anakin always answer.

Whether Obi-Wan's legendary cleverness might beat Anakin's raw power, straight up, no rules, is the subject of schoolyard fistfights, crèche-pool wriggle-matches, and pod-chamber stinkwars across the Republic. These struggles always end, somehow, with the combatants on both sides admitting that it doesn't matter.

Anakin and Obi-Wan would never fight each other.

They couldn't.

They're a team. They're _the_ team.

And both of them are sure they always will be.


	12. Chapter 2 (1)

**#11**

**Chapter 2: _Dooku_ (#1)**

* * *

Palpatine shackled into a large swivel chair. Even in the tiny translucent blur, he looked exhausted and in pain – but alive.

Anakin's heart thumped once, painfully, against his ribs. He wasn't too late. Not this time.

He dropped to one knee and squinted at the image. Palpatine looked as if he'd aged ten years since Anakin had last seen him. Muscle bulged along the young Jedi's jaw. If Grievous had hurt the Chancellor – had so much as _touched_ him–

The hand of jointed durasteel inside his black glove clenched so hard that electronic feedback made his shoulder ache.


	13. Chapter 2 (2)

**#12**

**Chapter 2: _Dooku_ (#2)**

* * *

Anakin barely heard him. He stared down at his black-gloved fist. He opened his fist, closed it, opened it again. The ache from his shoulder flowed down to the middle of his bicep–

And it didn't stop.

His elbow sizzled, and his forearm; his wrist had been packed with red-hot gravel, and his hand–

His hand was on _fire_.

But it wasn't _his_ hand. Or his wrist, or his forearm, or his elbow. It was a creation of jointed durasteel and electrodrivers.

"Anakin?"

Anakin's lips drew back from his teeth. "It hurts."

"What, your replacement arm? When did you have it equipped with pain sensors?"

"I _didn't_. That's the _point_."

"The pain is in your mind, Anakin–"

"No." Anakin's heart froze over. His voice went cold as space. "I can feel him."

"Him?"

"Dooku. He's here. Here on that ship."


	14. Chapter 2 (3)

**#13**

**Chapter 2: _Dooku_ (#3)**

* * *

Anakin turned to his astromech. "You stay here, Artoo–"

The little droid interrupted him with a wheedling whirr.

"No arguments. Stay. I mean it."

R2-D2's whistling reply had a distinctly sulky tone.

"Listen, Artoo, someone has to maintain computer contact; do you see a datajack anywhere on _me_?"

The droid seemed to acquiesce, but not before wheeping what sounded like it might have been a suggestion where to look.


	15. Chapter 2 (4)

**#14**

**Chapter 2: _Dooku_ (#4)**

* * *

Dooku could not argue. Not only had the Dark Lord introduced Dooku to realms of power beyond his most spectacular fantasies, but Sidious was also a political manipulator so subtle that his abilities might be considered to dwarf even the power of the dark side itself. It was said that whenever the Force closes a hatch, it opens a viewport... and every viewport that had so much as cracked in this past thirteen standard years had found a Dark Lord of the Sith already at the rim, peering in, calculating how best to slip through.


	16. Chapter 3 (1)

**#15**

**Chapter 3: _The Way of the Sith_ (#1)**

* * *

The lights came back on.

Anakin froze.

The dark figure in the chair – it _was_ Chancellor Palpatine, it was, and there were no droids to be seen, and his heart should have leapt within his chest, but–

Palpatine looked bad.

The Chancellor looked beyond old, looking ancient like Yoda was ancient: possessed of incomprehensible age. And exhausted, and in pain. And worse–

Anakin saw in the Chancellor's face something he'd never dreamed he's find there, and it squeezed breath from his lungs and wiped words from his brain.

Palpatine looked _frightened_.

Anakin didn't know what to say. He couldn't _imagine_ what to say. All he could imagine was what Grievous and Dooku must have done to put fear on the face of this brave good man–

And that imagining ignited a sizzle in his blood that drew his face tight and clouded his heart and started again the low roll of thunder in his ears: thunder from Aargonar. From Jabiim.

Thunder from the Tusken camp.


	17. Chapter 3 (2)

**#16**

**Chapter 3: _The Way of the Sith_ (#2)**

* * *

Skywalker came on, mechanically inexorable, impossibly powerful, a destroyer droid with a lightsaber: each step a blow and each blow a step. Dooku backed away as fast as he dared; Skywalker stayed right on top of him. Dooku's breath went short and hard. He no longer tried to block Skywalker's strikes but only to guide them slanting away; he could not meet Skywalker strength-to-strength – not only did the boy wield tremendous reserves of Force energy, but his sheer physical power was astonishing–

And only then did Dooku understand that he'd been suckered.


	18. Chapter 3 (3)

**#17**

**Chapter 3: _The Way of the Sith_ (#3)**

* * *

Skywalker leapt from the balcony. Even as the boy hurtled downwards, Dooku felt a new twist in the currents of the Force between them, and he finally understood.

He understood how Skywalker was getting stronger. Why he no longer spoke. How he had become a machine of battle. He understood why Sidious had been so interested in him for so long.

Skywalker was a natural.

There was a thermonuclear furnace where his heart should be, and it was burning through the firewalls of his Jedi training. He held the Force in the clench of a white-hot fist. He was half Sith already, and he didn't even know it.

The boy had the gift of fury.


	19. Chapter 3 (4)

**#18**

**Chapter 3: _The Way of the Sith_ (#4)**

* * *

Then Sidious, for some reason, decided to intervene.

"Don't fear what you're feeling, Anakin, _use_ it!" he barked in Palpatine's voice. "Call upon your fury. Focus it, and he cannot stand against you. _Rage_ is your weapon. Strike now! _Strike! Kill him!_"

Dooku thought blankly, _kill me?_

He and Skywalker paused for one single, final instant, blades locked together, staring at each other past a sizzling cross of scarlet against blue, and in that instant Dooku found himself wondering in bewildered astonishment if Sidious had suddenly lost his mind. Didn't he understand the advice he's just given?

Whose side was he on, anyway?

And through the cross of their blades he saw in Skywalker's eyes the promise of hell, and he felt a sickening presentiment that he already knew the answer to that question.

Treachery is the way of the Sith.


	20. Chapter 4 (1)

**#19**

**Chapter 4: _Jedi Trap_ (#1)**

* * *

This is the death of Count Dooku:

A starbust of clarity blossoms within Anakin Skywalker's mind, when he says to himself _Oh. I get it, now_ and discovers that the fear within his heart can be a weapon, too.

It is that simple, and that complex.

And it is final.

Dooku is dead already. The rest is mere detail.

The play is still on; the comedy of lightsabers flashes and snaps and hisses. Dooku & Skywalker, a one-time-only command performance, for an audience of one. Jedi and Sith and Sith and Jedi, spinning, whirling, crashing together, slashing and chopping, parrying, binding, slipping and whipping, and ripping the air around them with snarls of power.

And all for nothing, because a nuclear flame has consumed Anakin Skywalker's Jedi restraint, and fear becomes fury without effort, and fury is a blade that makes his lightsaber a toy.

The play goes on, but the suspense is over. It has become mere pantomime, as intricate and as meaningless as the space-time curves that guide galactic clusters through a measureless cosmos.

Dooku's decades of combat experience are irrelevant. His mastery of swordplay is useless. His vast wealth, his political influence, impeccable breeding, immaculate manners, exquisite taste – all the pursuits and points of pride to which he had devoted so much of his time and attention over the long, long years of his life – are now chains hung upon his spirit, bending his neck before the ax.

Even his knowledge of the Force has become a joke.

It is this knowledge that shows him his death, makes him handle it, turn it this way and that in his mind, examine it in detail like a black gemstone so cold it burns. Dooku's elegant farce has degenerated into bathetic melodrama, and not one shed tear will mark the passing of its hero.

But for Anakin, in the fight there is only terror, and rage.

Only he stands between death and the two men he loves best in all the world, and he can no longer afford to hold anything back. That imaginary dead-star dragon tries its best to freeze away his strength, to whisper to him that Dooku has beaten him before, that Dooku has all the power of the darkness, to remind him how Dooku took his hand, how Dooku could strike down even Obi-Wan himself seemingly without effort and now Anakin is all alone and he will never be a match for any Dark Lord of the Sith–

But Palpatine's words _rage is your weapon_ have given Anakin permission to unseal the shielding around his furnace heart, and all his fears and all his doubts shrivel in its flame.

When Count Dooku flies at him, blade flashing, Watto's fists crack out from Anakin's childhood to knock the Sith Lord back.

When with all the power that the dark side can draw from throughout the universe, Dooku hurls a jagged fragment of durasteel table, Shmi Skywalker's gentle murmur _I knew you would come for me, Anakin_ smashes it aside.

His head has been filled with the smoke from his smothered heart for far too long; it has been the thunder that darkens his mind. On Aargonar, on Jabiim, in the Tusken camp on Tatooine, that smoke had clouded his mind, had blinded him and left him flailing in the dark, a mindless machine of slaughter; but here, now, within this ship, this microscopic cell of life in the infinite sterile desert of space, his firewalls have opened so that the terror and the rage are _out there_, in the fight instead of in his head, and Anakin's mind is clear as a crystal bell.

In that pristine clarity, there is only one thing he must do.

Decide.

So he does.

He decides to _win_.

He decides that Dooku should lose the same hand he took. Decision is reality, here: his blade moves simultaneously with his will and blue fire vaporizes black Corellian nanosilk and disintegrates flesh and shears bone, and away falls a Sith Lord's lightsaber hand, trailing smoke that tastes of charred meat and burned hair. The hand falls with a bar of scarlet blaze still extending from its spastic death grip, and Anakin's heart sings for the fall of that red blade.

He reaches out and the Force catches it for him.

And then Anakin takes Dooku's other hand as well.

Dooku crumples to his knees, face blank, mouth slack, and his weapon whirs through the air to the victor's hand, and Anakin finds his vision of the future happening before his eyes: two blades at Count Dooku's throat.

But, here, now, the truth belies the dream. Both lightsabers are in _his_ hands, and the one in his hand of flesh flares with the synthetic bloodshine of a Sith blade.

Dooku, cringing, shrinking with dread, still finds some hope in his heart that he is wrong, that Palpatine has not betrayed him, that this has all been proceeding according to plan–

Until he hears "Good, Anakin! Good! I _knew_ you could do it!" and registers this is Palpatine's voice and feels within the darkest depths of all he is the approach of the words that are to come next.

"Kill him," Palpatine says. "Kill him now."

In Skywalker's eyes he sees only flames.


	21. Chapter 4 (2)

**#20**

**Chapter 4: _Jedi Trap_ (#2)**

* * *

But Dooku–

Dooku had been murdered.

By him.

On purpose.

Here in the General's Quarters, he had looked into the eyes of a living being and coldly decided to end that life. He could have chosen the right way. He could have chosen the Jedi way.

But instead–

He stared down at Dooku's severed head.

He could never unchoose this choice. He could never take it back. As Master Windu liked to say, there is no such thing as a second chance.

And he wasn't even sure he wanted one.


	22. Chapter 4 (3)

**#21**

**Chapter 4: _Jedi Trap_ (#3)**

* * *

"Obi-Wan!"

He sprang to his feet and waved away the debris that had buried the body of his friend. Obi-Wan lay entirely still, eyes closed, dust-caked blood matting his hair where his scalp had split.

Bad as Obi-Wan looked, Anakin had stood over the bodies of too many friends on too many battlefields to be panicked by a little blood. One touch to Obi-Wan's throat confirmed the strength of his pulse, and that touch also let Anakin's Force perception flow through the whole body of his friend. His breathing was strong and regular, and no bones were broken: this was a concussion, no more.

Apparently Obi-Wan's head was somewhat harder than the cruiser's interior walls.


	23. Chapter 5

**#22**

**Chapter 5: _Grievous_**

* * *

This is General Grievous:

Durasteel. Ceramic armorplast-plated duranium. Electrodrivers and crystal circuitry.

Within them: the remnants of a living being.

He doesn't breathe. He doesn't eat. He cannot laugh, and he does not cry.

A lifetime ago he was an organic sentient being. A lifetime ago he had friends, a family, an occupation; a lifetime ago he had things to love, and things to fear. Now he had none of these.

Instead, he has _purpose_.

It's built into him.

He is built to intimidate. The resemblance to a human skeleton melded with limbs styled after the legendary Krath war droids is entirely intentional. It is a face and form born of childhood's infinite nightmares.

He is built to dominate. The ceramic armorplast plates protecting limbs and torso and face can stop a burst from a starfighter's laser cannon. Those indestructible arms are ten times stronger than human, and move with the blurring speed of electronic reflexes.

He is built to eradicate. Those human-sized hands have human-sized fingers for exactly one reason: to hold a lightsaber.

Four of them hang inside his cloak.

He has never constructed a lightsaber. He has never bought one, nor has he recovered one that was lost. Each and all, he has taken from the dead hands of Jedi he has killed.

Personally.

He has many, many such trophies; the four he carries with him are his particular favorites. One belonged to the interminable K'Kruhk, whom he had bested at Hypori; another to the Viraanntesse Jedi Jmmarr, who'd fallen at Vandos; the other two had been created by Puroth and Nystammall, whom Grievous had slaughtered together on the flame-grass plains of Tovaskl so that each would know the other's death, as well as their own; these are murders he recalls with so much pleasure that touching these souvenirs with his hands of armorplast and durasteel brings him something resembling joy.

But only resembling.

He remembers joy. He remembers anger, and frustration. He remembers grief and sorrow.

He doesn't actually feel any of them. Not anymore.

He's not designed for it.


	24. Chapter 6 (1)

**#23**

**Chapter 6: _Rescue_ (#1)**

* * *

The Chancellor hugged Anakin's ankle with improbable strength, peering fearfully into the darkness below. "Anakin, do something! You have to _do_ something!"

_I'm open to suggestion_, he thought, but he said, "Don't panic. Just hang on."

"I don't think I can..." The Chancellor turned his anguished face upward imploringly. "Anakin, I'm slipping. Give me your hand – you have to _give_ me your _hand_!"

And drop Obi-Wan? Not in this millennium.


	25. Chapter 6 (2)

**#24**

**Chapter 6: _Rescue_ (#2)**

* * *

Obi-Wan Kenobi opened his eyes to find himself staring at what he strongly suspected was Anakin's butt.

It _looked_ like Anakin's butt – well, his pants, anyway – though it was thoroughly impossible for Obi-Wan to be certain, since he had never before had the occasion to examine Anakin's butt upside down, which it currently appeared to be, nor from this rather uncomfortably close range.

And how he might have arrived at this angle and this range was entirely baffling.

He said, "Um, have I missed something?"

"Hang on," he heard Anakin say. "We're in a bit of a situation here."

So it _was_ Anakin's butt after all. He supposed he might take a modicum of comfort from that. Looking up, he discovered Anakin's legs, and his boots – and a somewhat astonishing close-up view of the Supreme Chancellor, as Palpatine seemingly balanced overhead, supported only by a white-knuckled death-grip on Anakin's ankle.

"Oh, hello, Chancellor," he said mildly. "Are you well?"

The Chancellor cast a distressed glance over his shoulder. "I _hope_ so..."

Obi-Wan followed the Chancellor's gaze; above Palpatine rose a long, long vertical shaft.

Which was when he finally realized that he wasn't looking _up_ at all.

This must be what Anakin meant by _a bit of a situation_.

"Ah," Obi-Wan said. At least he was finally coming to understand where he stood.

Well, lay. Hung. Whatever.


	26. Chapter 6 (3)

**#25**

**Chapter 6: _Rescue_ (#3)**

* * *

One door opened just as they skidded onto it and all three of them tumbled through. They landed in a heap on a turbolift lobby's opposite wall as the pod shot past overhead.

They gradually managed to untangle themselves. "Are... all of your rescues so..." Palpatine gasped breathlessly. "... _entertaining_?"

Obi-Wan gave Anakin a thoughtful frown.

Anakin returned it with a shrug.

"Actually, now that you mention it," Obi-Wan said, "yes."


	27. Chapter 6 (4)

**#26**

**Chapter 6: _Rescue_ (#4)**

* * *

There are so few things a Jedi ever owns; even his lightsaber is less a possession than an expression of his identity. To be a Jedi is to renounce possessions. And Anakin had tried so hard, tried for so long, to do just that.

Even on their wedding day, Anakin had had no devotion gift for his new wife; he didn't actually _own_ anything.

But love will find a way.

He had brought something like a gift to her apartments in Theed, still a little shy with her, still overwhelmed by finding the feelings in her he'd felt so long himself, not knowing quite how to give her a gift which wasn't really a gift. Nor was it his to give.

Without anything of his own to give except his love, all he could bring her was a friend.

"I didn't have many friends when I was a kid," he'd told her, "so I built one."

And C-3PO had shuffled in behind him, gleaming as though he'd been plasted with solid gold.


	28. Chapter 6 (5)

**#27**

**Chapter 6: _Rescue_ (#5)**

* * *

"This weapon is your _life_, Obi-Wan!" He did a credible-enough Kenobi impression that Palpatine had to smother a snort. "You must take _care_ of it!"


	29. Chapter 7

**#28**

**Chapter 7: _Obi-Wan and Anakin 2_**

* * *

The cruiser bounced even harder, and its attitude began to skew as a new klaxon joined the blare of the other alarms. "That wasn't me!" Anakin jerked his hands away from the board. "I haven't even _done_ anything yet!"

"It certainly wasn't." Palpatine's voice was unnaturally calm. "It seems someone is shooting at us."

"Wonderful," Anakin muttered. "Could this day get any better?"


	30. Part Two: Seduction

**#29**

**Part Two: Seduction**

* * *

The dark is generous, and it is patient.

It is the dark that seeds cruelty into justice, that drips contempt into compassion, that poisons love with grains of doubt.

The dark can be patient, because the slightest drop of rain will cause those seeds to sprout.

The rain will come, and the seeds will sprout, for the dark is the soil in which they grow, and it is the clouds above them, and it waits behind the star that gives them light.

The dark's patience is infinite.

Eventually, even stars burn out.


	31. Chapter 9

**#30**

**Chapter 9: _Padmé_**

* * *

This is Padmé Amidala:

She is an astonishingly accomplished young woman, who in her short life has been already the youngest-ever elected Queen of her planet, a daring partisan guerrilla, and a measured, articulate, and persuasive voice of reason in the Republic Senate.

But she is, at this moment, none of these things.

She can still play at them – she pretends to be a Senator, she still wields the moral authority of a former Queen, and she is not shy about using her reputation for fierce physical courage to her advantage in political debate – but her inmost reality, the most fundamental, unbreakable core of her being, is something entirely different.

She is Anakin Skywalker's wife.

Yet _wife_ is a word too weak to carry the truth of her; _wife_ is such a small word, such a common word, a word that can come from a downturned mouth with so many petty, unpleasant echoes. For Padmé Amidala, saying _I am Anakin Skywalker's wife_ is saying neither more or less than _I'm alive_.

Her life before Anakin belonged to someone else, some lesser being to be pitied, some poor impoverished spirit who could never suspect how profoundly life should be lived.

Her real life began the first time she looked into Anakin Skywalker's eyes and found in there not the uncritical worship of little Ani from Tatooine, but the direct, unashamed, smoldering passion of a powerful Jedi: a _young_ man, to be sure, but every centimeter a _man_ – a man whose legend was already growing within the Jedi Order and beyond. A man who knew exactly what he wanted and was honest enough to unroll his deepest feelings before her without fear and without shame. A man who had loved her for a decade, with faithful and patient heart, while he waited for the act of destiny he was sure would someday open her own heart to the fire in his.

But though she loves her husband without reservation, love does not blind her to his faults. She is older than he, and wise enough to understand him better than he does himself. He is not a perfect man: he is prideful, and moody, and quick to anger – but these faults only make her love him the more, for every flaw is more than balanced by the greatness within him, his capacity for joy and cleansing laughter, his extraordinary generosity of spirit, his passionate devotion not only to her but also in the service of every living being.

He is a wild creature who has come gently to her hand, a vine tiger purring against her cheek. Every softness of his touch, every kind glance or loving word is a small miracle in itself. How can she not be grateful for such gifts?

This is why she will not allow their marriage to become public knowledge. Her husband _needs_ to be a Jedi. Saving people is what he was born for; to take that away from him would cripple every good thing in his troubled heart.

Now she holds him in their infinite kiss with both arms tight around his neck, because there is a cold dread in the center of her heart that whispers this kiss is not infinite at all, that it's only a pause in the headlong rush of the universe, and when it ends, she will have to face the future.

And she is terrified.

Because while he has been away, everything has changed.

Today, here in the hallway of the Senate Office Building, she brings him news of a gift they have given each other – a gift of joy, and of terror. This gift is the edge of a knife that has already cut their past from their future.

For these long years they have held each other only in secret, only in moments stolen from the business of the Republic and the war; their love has been the perfect refuge, a long quiet afternoon, warm and sunny, sealed away from fear and doubt, from duty and from danger. But now she carries within her a planetary terminator that will end their warm afternoon forever and leave them blind in the oncoming night.

She is more, now, than Anakin Skywalker's wife.

She is the mother of Anakin Skywalker's unborn child.


	32. Chapter 10 (1)

**#31**

**Chapter 10: _Masters_ (#1)**

* * *

Which was when Anakin had realized Yoda wasn't going to be any help at all. The greatest sage of the Jedi Order had nothing better to offer him than more pious babble about Letting Things Pass Out Of His Life.

Like he hadn't heard that a million times already.


	33. Chapter 10 (2)

**#32**

**Chapter 10: _Masters_ (#2)**

* * *

The ride to Palpatine's office was quietly tense. Anakin had tried making conversation with the two tall helmet-masked figures in the red robes, but they weren't exactly chatty.


	34. Part Three: Apocalypse

**#33**

**Part Three: Apocalypse**

* * *

The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins.

It always wins because it is everywhere.

It is in the wood that burns in your hearth, and in the kettle on fire; it is under your chair and under your table and under the sheets on your bed. Walk in the midday sun and the dark is with you, attached to the soles of your feet.

The brightest light casts the darkest shadow.


	35. Chapter 17

**#34**

**Chapter 17: _The Face of the Dark_**

* * *

Depowered lampdisks were rings of ghostly gray floating in the gloom. The shimmering jewelscape of Coruscant haloed the knife-edged shadow of the chair.

This was the office of the Chancellor.

Within the chair's shadow sat another shadow; deeper, darker, formless and impenetrable, an abyssal umbra so profound that it drained light from the room around it.

And from the city. And the planet.

And the galaxy.

The shadow waited. It had told the boy it would. It was looking forward to keeping its word.

For a change.


	36. Last Page

**#35**

**Last Page**

* * *

The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins – but in the heart of its strength lies weakness: one lone candle is enough to hold it back.

Love is more than a candle.

Love can ignite the stars.


	37. Outro

**#36**

**Outro**

* * *

Well, the time has come to say goodbye :'(

If you wish to read more, a lot more – a whole novel written so beautifully, I can only suggest to you to read directly the "_Revenge of the Sith_" novelisation by Matthew Stover :)

And if you already read it, every excuse is valid to go read it another time, and another time, and again and again and again for the rest of your lives x')


End file.
